London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The crisis in the eurozone has deflected attention from banking and the proposals published almost exactly three months ago in the final report from the inquiry chaired by Sir John Vickers.

This suggested that the UK banking system would be safer and the likelihood of another taxpayer bailout much reduced if the High Street - or retail - operations of Britain's banks were ring-fenced so they could be insulated against things going wrong on the riskier investment-banking side.

But the subject is far too important to be allowed to fall victim to banking fatigue, the perfectly understandable wish among normal people never to see or read anything to do with banks and banking ever again.

Much as the banks may hope to string things out so the drive for reform runs out of momentum, it falls to everyone else to make sure this does not happen. We might not be able to stop another banking crisis, but at the very least we should try to stop it recurring in exactly the same way.

The Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, the City think tank, seems to have come to a similar conclusion and has just published a collection of essays on the banking-reform proposals* by no fewer than 37 of the Square Mile's most distinguished practitioners, observers and regulators. But what sets this particular mix apart is that most are either retired or nearing the end of their career.

At a time when there is growing concern about how callow and inexperienced our politicians and many who hold senior jobs in our banks and financial institutions are, this eclectic group brings wisdom and experience. It is a combination all too rare in the city these days.

As such it has echoes of Grumpy Old Bankers, a collection of essays published by the think tank a couple of years ago, which brought together a similar group to give their views on the causes of the financial crisis.

Unfortunately there is such a diversity of view that the report is impossible to summarise but, if nothing else, I would suggest everyone read the commentary by Stanislas Yassukovich. Around the time of Big Bang he was one of the most distinguished bankers in London, being then head of Merrill Lynch in Europe and chairman of the Securities Association - a forerunner of the Financial Services Authority - and deputy chairman of the Stock Exchange.

He notes how the banking lobby has used various strategies to defend the indefensible, the indefensible being the megabank business model, also known as the "too big to fail" model.

These, he notes, were formerly known as universal banks and used to be run by proper Continental bankers. More recently, however, they have, with a few exceptions, been run by "corporate cowboys".

Big Bang encouraged high street banks to take over investment banks because conventional banking was getting tougher and they thought the grass was greener on the other side. It was this mass movement of money into a business the traditional bankers had no feel for, and failed to understand, which set the stage for the carnage to come.

The understanding or risk was lost, and so too was the fundamental divide between agent and principal, the separation of the client's interest from the bank's interest.

"Never has there been such an exchange of incompetence between two branches of the same industry," Yassukovich writes.

Ring-fencing is therefore a perfectly rational response, though arguably it does not go far enough. Yassukovich regrets that the Vickers Commission "funked" total separation. Had they proposed it then "shareholders could have retained franchise value through the spin-off of the investment banking activities while a cleaned-up retail sector could revert to traditional banking and concentrate on customer service".

But he also warns no amount of reform can tackle the underlying problem, which is a total shift in the culture of the financial services industry.

"Bonus pools attached to business units, with awards made regardless of the firms' overall results, killed what was left of corporate loyalty," he says. "Alan Greenspan thought self-preservation instincts would ensure banks avoided excess.

"He had failed to appreciate that bankers no longer gave a tinker's curse for the reputation or long-term integrity of their employer: they were only concerned with the integrity of their bonus pool in the current year."

But to finish on a positive note, he did say there was no way that Vickers-style reform could damage the City. The UK domestic banking industry has only ever been a minimal force in the City's international development, he says.

Clients come here because the big liquid capital markets are here and the investment banks, the vast majority of which are foreign owned, know how to access them on their behalf.

What happens in the UK domestic market is of very little interest to the investment banks, and even less to their clients. So the City's attractiveness as an international banking centre should continue, as indeed it has done for centuries, pretty well regardless of what is happening domestically.

*Views on Vickers: Responses to the ICB Report. Published by the CSFI £19.95